


Chrysalid

by IamShadow21



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Wings, Based on a Tumblr Post, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Community: trope_bingo, Flying, Gen, Gen Work, Gen or Pre-Slash, I Blame Tumblr, Inspired By Tumblr, Magic, Magical Realism, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Suicide Attempt, Super Soldier Serum, Trope Bingo Round 3, Trope Subversion, Trope Subversion/Inversion, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're not ashamed of them, not really. You just wish that if the serum was going to give you super strength and health and ridiculous head wings, the government would have at least given you something less humiliating to do than parade around in fancy dress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrysalid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [copperbadge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/gifts).



> Gifted to Sam, because he's got a lot on his plate right now.
> 
> Inspired by Sam's adorable funny post [Headwings](http://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/90698938096/headwings), which talks about Steve maybe having actual head wings in the comics, and what that might mean. Because I'm not really a comics person, this story is pretty strictly MCU.
> 
> This is a gen work, but tagged with Steve/Bucky because it could be read as pre-slash. So, for those who like pure gen, enjoy! And for those who like pre-slash, enjoy. Both interpretations are valid.
> 
> I have also tagged for magical realism, even though I don't know that it's technically magical realism, but I don't know what else to tag it as because this in no way obeys the laws of actual physics.
> 
> Lastly, I have tagged for suicide attempt, because Steve's actions at the end of Cap 1 & 2 both constitute lack of care for personal safety and/or suicidal behaviour.
> 
> Retroactively claiming this for my Trope Bingo Round 3 card, for wingfic.

You've pretty much accepted that you're going to die when the Vitarays start making your bones grow and stretch. You're so overwhelmed when you _don't_ die, that at first, you don't notice _them_. After all, you're almost a foot taller. You can take a full breath without wheezing. You can hear everything round you, on both sides. Everything you see is picked out in dizzying sharpness, in a spectrum of colours that all seemed a muddy wash before. Your heart is thumping fast, but regular, like a metronome, not in that fluttery, erratic way that is familiar. Your bones and joints still ache, but it's easing, like an ebbing tide, under a flood of endorphins.

“Well, that is unexpected,” Erskine murmurs to himself, when he helps you from the machine.

“How do you feel?” Peggy asks.

“Taller,” you reply honestly, because you're almost getting vertigo from this new viewpoint. It's like standing on a chair and looking down at everything.

Peggy reaches out a hand, her fingertips grazing your newly defined chest. 

That's when you feel it first, an alien flapping on the sides of your head, like a bird's got tangled in your hair. 

You duck down and raise one huge hand to knock it loose, but instead your fingers meet feathers and delicate bones. There's instant sensory feedback, and you're opening your mouth to ask what on earth is going on, when the viewing room explodes and all hell breaks loose.

*

The papers print a couple of pictures of you when you foil the Hydra agent. One is of you holding up the cab door like a shield. The other is of you standing over the body of the man who nearly stole the formula. You're soaking wet from head to foot and looking down at your arms with a mixture of disbelief and shock. In the newsprint, your hair just looks oddly disarrayed, but in the original photo, the one that winds up in the Smithsonian some seventy-odd years later, it's obvious that sprouting from your skull, above your ears, are a tiny pair of sodden, bedraggled wings.

*

Phillips has no need for a single super soldier, let alone one with tiny wings on his head, so he drops you like a hot coal and heads out to the front. You're still desperate to be useful, desperate to do anything. You find out 'anything' means going on the stage.

The show girls coo over you like you're their little brother. They're smart and worldly and strong and unashamed. They're everything the priests warned you about when your body started to wake up to attraction, even though it didn't actually give you the height and the muscle to do anything about it. Now you have that height and muscle, but you haven't a clue what you'd do with it.

“Hold still, honey,” Gladys says. 

Her fingers are deft and gentle. You've seen her and the other girls fixing their hair up in dozens of curls with nothing but pins, patience and a skill born of practice. Your hair routine had always just been a comb and a bit of Brylcreem, but, no more. Besides, you hate what the Brylcreem does to your feathers.

“Ain't gonna work,” Ruthie says.

Gladys ignores her. “Good thing your hair's long, otherwise there'd be no hiding 'em,” she continues.

“Pinches,” you say, trying not to wriggle.

“Course it does,” she says, with a laugh in her voice. “Beauty is painful.” She slides another bobby pin in, and your wings sit flatter to your skull, their mottled golden feathers blending in with your hair. “Now, you gonna hold 'em still, or you gonna spray the room with pins again, like last time?”

“I'll try not to,” you say. 

Gladys gives you a gentle pat, then goes to fix her lipstick.

*

The performances are easy enough, once you get over your nerves. The cowl holds the wings in check, even if the costumer felt the need to sew tiny wings to the sides of it, right over your real ones. 

When you're out without it, you always make sure you're wearing a hat, or you let Gladys or one of the other girls pin the wings down.

You're not ashamed of them, not really. You just wish that if the serum was going to give you super strength and health and ridiculous head wings, the government would have at least given you something less humiliating to do than parade around in fancy dress. 

*

Europe is a brutal awakening. The camp is bleak; a wallow of mud, shit, blood and gunpowder. The men are cruel to you, but you can't really blame them. You blame yourself, instead. Your eyes aren't hollow with horrors, your body isn't ripe with sweat and peppered with wounds. You've been living in an artificial bubble, a stage show that never ended, just picked up sticks and flitted from city to city.

You curl up in a corner, mostly out of the rain, and tug your cowl off. The moisture settles on the pages of your sketchbook, on your skin, in your hair. Your wings tremble in the breeze, and you allow yourself to reach up, trace the length of one with your fingertips. You don't touch them often. Like your body, your wings are cocooned and hidden under tinsel and tights, pinned and tucked out of sight. 

You wonder whether Erskine would have been proud of your path, or ashamed. You don't really know who you are any more, and it's got nothing to do with the reflection you see in the mirror.

Then Peggy says, “the 107th,” and your path seems clear.

*

You've never jumped from a plane before, especially not under fire, but the landing is easier than you thought it'd be.

You sneak and jump and disable as many sentries as you can. It's simple, and it's straightforward, and there's not an autograph hunter or bond salesman in sight. Somewhere along the road from the prison to the laboratory, you lose your helmet, Alice's helmet, but that's okay, because Bucky is all you can think about.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says, but he's looking at the wings.

They're not pinned down, and they're not discreet, because you can feel them fluttering around the tips of your ears with your urgency.

Bucky doesn't ask about them, doesn't take his eyes off them, as he stumbles at your side through the complex, with explosions going off left and right.

Then there's a chasm between you, and he won't leave without you, won't even move back from the edge of the walkway above that pit of fire, so you do the only thing you think you can do.

You jump.

*

It takes a good couple of days to get back to base camp, and Bucky is quiet. You've never known him to be so silent, so lost in thought. He walks and walks and walks. When you break, he leans against your side and sleeps as though he's drugged, before you have to nudge him awake to walk again. There's no food, there are no medical supplies, and no drinking water save what you can find in streams and abandoned wells. When Bucky's feet burst with blisters, you tear your undershirt into strips and bind the wounds with careful hands.

Bucky watches your wings, and it's easy to pretend he's not doing it when there are so many people depending on you to get them home.

*

“I thought my head was screwed up,” Bucky says softly from the doorway of the tent they've assigned you. “I thought I'd cracked.”

You watch him as he slips in like a shadow. Someone has cleaned his wounds and given him a fresh uniform to wear. It's buttoned crookedly, and his bootlaces are tied in sloppy bows.

“These?” you ask, raising a hand to the side of your head.

“They did all sorts of shit to me, injected me with God knows what, and then, you were there, and you were _big_ , and you had wings. You weren't supposed to be there, Steve. I thought you were dead. Or I was.”

“I'm not,” you reassure him. “You're not.”

“And then, you flew across the factory, right over an explosion,” Bucky continues.

You wince. “Rather you didn't spread that one around,” you say.

“Ain't no other word for it,” Bucky says. He reaches out a hand, and suddenly, he's stroking them. You shiver. “They don't look like much,” he says. “But they carried you safe.”

“I guess,” you say. Bucky's still touching you, still rubbing his fingertips back and forth across them. You shiver again, and they flutter out proud. “I mean, I couldn't fly before, so I suppose it's them.”

Bucky actually laughs, but it's a pale shadow of his Brooklyn abandon. “You're such a punk. Why would you let them do this to you?” he says, his hand slipping down to cradle your jaw.

“You know why,” you say.

“You're so stupid,” Bucky says, and his voice is plaintive and sad, so you don't banter back, just let your eyes shut, let your head lean forward to press against Bucky's own.

*

The wings would be useful if you could get them to be consistent. You can count on them when you're in the heat of battle, when the action is fast, and when you're running on instinct. However, doing something calculated, like jumping onto a moving train, you need to use a zipline just like everybody else.

You think you could have flown down and retrieved Bucky's body, but you've got the weight of knowledge that Jones is all alone, relying on you to back him up, so you cling to the train and cry.

You know that you could have flown out of the dying plane, but you don't want to. You choose to fall, instead.

*

You wear the helmet SHIELD made for you with its painted-on wings, because you think that somehow, your ability to fly has escaped the pages of history. You take the parachute from the Quinjet for the same reason, even though once you're clear, you unsnap the helmet and glide down on your own.

When Tony spits 'winghead' at you like an epithet, you nearly hit him. You suppose it could have been the sceptre, but in all honesty, you think you might have felt like that towards him anyway.

In New York, you stick to ground support, because so many of your team specialise in aerial or up-high that your inconsistent gift is more likely to hinder than help.

You lose your cowl, fall from a second storey window, and land safely, if ungracefully, in the street.

You forget that in the twenty-first century, everything is recorded.

*

When SHIELD settles you in DC and anchors you to the strike team, Fury smiles.

“No more hiding,” he says, and shows you a shaky video of a New York street, of your wings unfurling just in time.

When you jump into the ocean next to the Lemurian Star, you don't bother with the parachute at all.

When Fury gets shot, you jump from building to building, your wings keeping you safe above the streets. 

When the strike team turns on you, you smash out of the elevator and glide down to the plaza below. 

The Serum may have given you wings, but SHIELD, _Hydra_ , have given you the skill to control them and the need to use them. 

When Sam reveals his speciality to you, you laugh for the first time in days.

*

The Winter Soldier is the toughest opponent you have ever fought in your life. He's ruthless and relentless and he keeps you fighting for your life up until the moment that you're not, the moment you unmask him. 

You falter, and it's very nearly fatal.

On the third Helicarrier, you resolve to not make the same mistake.

When Bucky's metal hand twists one wing hard enough for the delicate bones to break, you scream, and remember gentle fingertips in a dim cave of damp canvas. 

It's limp and dead, the primaries brushing your neck, when you say, “I'm not going to fight you.”

When he gets you on your back, you half-expect him to break the other, but he just hits you again and again, his eyes large with terror and pain, and then you're falling, falling...

*

There's a paparazzi photograph in the tabloids of you getting wheeled into the hospital. You're soaking wet, unconscious, covered in mud and blood. Your damaged wing is clearly visible, a crumpled, twisted thing, the feathers broken and split. Behind you, SHIELD is burning.

*

You've been on the hunt for six months, coming back only periodically to rest and recuperate. You're still in your DC apartment. Stark's offered you some penthouse in the sky in New York, but you're not ready for that. You placate him with a promise to move there some time in the future, and he's happy enough to debug your apartment with extreme prejudice. 

You have no doubt he's left a few of his own bugs behind, but right now, Tony's the lesser of two evils. You really don't want Hydra listening in on your day to day life.

You go for a run, grab a paper, a coffee and a bearclaw, and come back to find your door ajar. It's not subtle, but the lock isn't forced, so it's not a simple break-in. You set your snack aside and slip into your apartment like it's a hostile compound.

Bucky's sitting in your armchair, the same armchair Fury had sat in all those months ago. He's thin, and a bit dirty, and he looks like he's been through hell.

“Hey, Bucky,” you say warily, half-expecting a fight.

“Hey,” he says with an apologetic smile. “I got cold. Waiting,” he flaps his hand towards the window. You wonder if he meant he was sitting on the stoop, or on the opposite roof. 

“I got coffee,” you say. “And food. You hungry?”

Bucky shrugs, but his tongue flicks out across his lip, once.

“I'll get it, wait here,” you say, and retrieve the food. You grab a mug from the kitchen and carefully tip half the coffee into it before setting it by Bucky. The bearclaw gets torn fairly evenly down the middle and placed beside it. Bucky watches you eat and drink for a little while before daring to reach for his own. 

The coffee disappears in two deep gulps, and the bearclaw he tears into with his teeth. You wonder when he ate last, when he slept.

“It's spaghetti for dinner tonight, you're welcome to stay,” you say.

Bucky's sucking sugar from his fingertips, eyeing what's left of your bearclaw. You hold it out, and he actually takes it from you without hesitation.

“Okay,” he says eventually, when the food has vanished.

*

Bucky eats enough pasta to sink a ship, and so do you. One thing you love about the new century is the food. It's full of a rainbow of vegetables, plenty of ground beef, and covered in as much cheese and pepper as you want. The bread on the side is fresh baked today, a long oval loaf with a sharp crust and cloudy insides that you keep carving slice after slice from. Bucky layers the butter so thick on his that it stands in peaks.

“I always liked dripping, but butter's really something,” Bucky says abruptly. He hasn't spoken in hours, so you startle a little.

“It is,” you agree with a smile.

“I thought they were gone, when you came in,” Bucky says, pointing at his head.

You'd been wearing a beanie against the morning cold, you remember.

“No, not gone,” you say with a rueful smile.

“I thought I'd broken them,” Bucky says, and he looks distressed.

“I healed,” you say simply. “They're fine. See?”

You lean in a little closer, make them flare and flap out. Bucky makes a small movement, arrested.

“You can touch,” you say, and he does.

“I thought I'd imagined them,” Bucky says. 

“I know,” you say.

“I thought I was broken, that you were someone else, someone I was seeing with his face,” Bucky continues, delicately tracing the wing he'd so cruelly twisted. “I thought, if they went away, that I'd see who you really were. My mission.”

You suddenly realise he's not talking about the war at all, but the Helicarrier.

“You were on the bridge, and we fell,” Bucky says, before lowering his hand, ducking his head back to his bread and butter.

“Yeah,” you say, and you're breathless.

“But this is real, we're here now,” Bucky says, as though he's not quite certain, as though he's trying it out for size.

“We are,” you say.

“Well, fancy that,” Bucky says, a smile, familiar and crooked, spreading across his weary face.

You smile right back, and cut him another slice.

**Author's Note:**

> Make sure you go and look at and kudos the fanart kath-ballantyne made me while I was making dinner! It's just perfect.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [For Chrysalid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1895577) by [kath_ballantyne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kath_ballantyne/pseuds/kath_ballantyne)




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